Month: October 2008

Why I Didn’t Comment on the Race Baiting Fraud

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I make no claim to wisdom or prescience, but I had reasons not to discuss this story.

  • I had nothing meaningful to add. I haven’t been talking about the assaults and death threats at McCain-Palin rallies either. I put this stuff down to C=MI,* and figure that is just the way things are.
  • To the degree that I have political teeth, I cut them in the UMass SGA Senate, where I served with future actors in the Abramoff and Sciavo matters† who were in the College Republicans, which gave me a nose for College Republican bullsh&#, and this reeked of College Republican bullsh&#.

    Thus. when I heard that this was a College Republican, I figured that it was a stunt which did not deserve comment.

  • By the time I heard about it, the note that the “B” was backwards, and likely applied in front of a mirror.

I just don’t one of those typewriter font types who need to get a life.

*Conservatism equals Mental Illness.
†Interestingly enough, more often than not, we were on the same side in SGA Senate,a Mondale Democrat and College Republicans,against the “US Out of North America” crowd.

How to Know When a Burocracy is Out of Control

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When its budget is growing so fast that auditors cannot keep up..

Case in point, the Pentagon:

Government reports are not known for plain language, much less candor. But in a report issued in March, Pentagon Inspector General Claude M. Kicklighter summed up what had been growing increasingly evident for years: Defense spending has been growing so rapidly that auditors can no longer keep track.

“We currently are not able to provide sufficient audit coverage of [Department of Defense] acquisition programs given the dollars expended by the department,” Mr. Kicklighter wrote. “The rapid growth of the DOD budget since FY 2000 leaves the Department increasingly more vulnerable to the fraud, waste and abuse that undermines the department’s mission.”

And they want to browbeat the next president into increasing their budget even more.

Major Army Strategist Savages Future Combat System*

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Col. H.R. McMaster, a, “is a highly influential soldier-scholar who is currently putting together a brain trust for Gen. David Petraeus to review U.S. policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan,” just released a blistering paper condemning the direction of the US military.

He believes that the folks who support the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which espouses high tech communications, surveillance, and precision weapons at the expense of boots on the ground is are profoundly wrong, and unclear on what is actually going on the ground right now.

He also cuts the flyboyz in the USAF a new one while he’s at it.

Good read, check it out.

*Full disclosure, I worked on the Future Recovery and Maintenance Vehicle, FRMV, “wrecker” variant of the FCS-MGV* from 2003-2006 at United Defense (later BAE Systems after the Carlyle Group sold me to buy Dunkin Donuts).

OK, Time to Call an Obama Adviser Stupid

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Specifically Paul Kaminiski, who is talking up a dual buy strategy for the USAF tanker competition.

There are a number of problems, not the least of which is the fact that this is the worst of all possible solutions, doubling inventory and supply issues.

You also pay the cost of the tooling and engineering twice

A bad deal for the tax payer and the military.

There is also the problem that the 767s being made for Italy do not work. (Paid subscription required)

Boeing has assigned a “tiger team” to deal with the wing flutter issues caused by the refuelling pods.

I Knew that It Did Not Look Right

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When I last posted about the PiperJet, I said that it didn’t look right, though I added the caveat that the same applies to the F-4 Phantom II.

Well, it appears that my hunch meant something. Piper is looking at , modifications to the airframe to deal with pitch changes from changes in thrust. They have an automatic trim system to handle this, but they would like to eliminate this and use, “a Coanda effect device that would channel the jet’s exhaust in an appropriate direction to reduce nose-down moment created by adding power and nose-up trim changes when decreasing power.”

Basically, they are talking a poor man’s thrust vectoring, I think.

“Baby Seal” Report May Have Cost RAND Analyst Their Job

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It appears that John Stillion has abruptly left his job as an analyst at the RAND corporation, He’s best known for writing a report which described the JSF as being clubbed like a baby seal in air to air combat by aircraft already flying.

Dennis Jensen, an Australian MP and a fierce critic of the JSF, who used this report to argue against Australia purchaasing the aircraft, is alleging that he was fired for this report.

Curiouser and curiouser.

I Recall an Anime Movie About This

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Specifically Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle.

Only this one is real, or at least in prototype state courtesy of those wacky Danes from art collective N55 in Copenhagen.

The theory is that when rising ocean levels from global warming make your current location to wet, the house walks somewhere else.

Reminds me of that bit of dialogue from a Get Smart episode:

99: What’s that?

Max: An electric snake, we’ll send it it to get
information.

99: What does it run on?

Max: Tiny Little Feet.

Heh.

Not Enough Bullets: Tax Loophole Edition

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Well, now we know why Wells Fargo wanted wanted to buy Wachovia, a tax loophole

The day after Citigroup made its bid, the Treasury changed a tax rule that lets banks accelerate the losses and writedowns on banks they acquire against their own net income, offsetting the charges as tax write-offs.

Wells plans on writing off some $74 billion of Wachovia’s $498 billion loan portfolio — an insanely large amount that reflects just how poisoned Wachovia’s books really were. With the new tax rules, it gets to use all of that $74 billion as a charge against its own net income, which means one thing: Wells Fargo’s going to be a tax-write-off machine for years to come.

Not enough bullets.

Bachmann Now Behind Tinklenberg

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SurveyUSA has the numbers:
Michele Bachmann(Insane ‘Phant): 44%
Elwyn Tinklenberg* (D): 47%
Bob Anderson (I) 6%.

There is a 4% margin of error, so it’s still too close to call. There is only about 2% undecided, and so the 2:1 undecideds breaking against the incumbent does not mean much here.

It will be close.

*I know that it’s not nice to make fun of someone’s name, but his name still sounds like a character from Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegone.